Title: Pianomania
Directed By: Lilian Franck, Robert Cibis
Written By: Lilian Franck, Robert Cibis
Cast: Stephan Knupfer, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, Julius Drake, Ian Bostridge, Rudolf Buchbinder
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/20/11
Opens: November 4, 2011
There are pharmacists who do nothing all day behind the counters of Duane-Reade and Walgreen’s and Rite Aid but read the prescriptions, take some good guesses from the physicians’ handwriting on the drugs to be issued, and put the pills into an automatic counter. Then there are pharmacists hired by GSK and Squibb and the other biggies who do intensive research into new products, racing for the cures. Similarly, there are the piano tuners who come to your house, listen to the parents who may not know a C from an F sharp, turn a tool left or right, and leave within a half hour. Generally they satisfy the elders, who listen to their kids’ playing and find it to be terrific. And then there are piano technicians, glorified tuners, who work for the concert pianists. Their year-‘round job is a far cry from the simple adjustments of spinet pianos with feeble sound. They do not simply tune the grand pianos at the great concert halls as they see fit but act according to the persnickety instructions of the masters—who in the old days would be the likes of José Iturbi and Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn. These piano technicians can never throw up their hands upon hearing the constant complaints and suggestions of the concert pianists, even if they cannot themselves hear anything wrong with the way the middle C sounds.
Directors Lilian Franc and Robert Civis believe that one of these technicians is charming enough to win us in the audience over, since only a small fraction of folks choosing to attend “Pianomania” would be interested wholly in the way the 88 keys are made to heel. Graciously avoiding the usual technique of mediocre documentarians—those who carry on interviews with an abundance of talking heads who sit in chairs and pontificate—the directors utilize no interviews at all. Everything proceeds naturally, the technician talking to the pianist, then responding. We’re flies on the wall, which is all to the good. In those instances that require the technician to make something clear to the movie audience when no-one else is around, he literally talks to himself, but in reality he is delivering a small soliloquy to us in our seats.
The gifted technician Is Stefan Knüpfer, a Hamburg resident, a former pianist who is now chief technician for Steinway & Sons. Most of his work shown here takes place in Vienna at the city’s famed concert house, photographers Robert Cibis and Jerzy Palacz taking breaks now and then to show us the wealth of statues in the city that at one time was the cultural and political capital of the world. Knüpfer is German-speaking but comfortable enough in English to communicate with a wide band of world-famous pianists. Lang Lang, for example, is said to have inspired twenty million youths in China to take up the instrument, given the way he has made some of the classics into “pop” style interpretations, banging out the notes to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #6 like a fellow trying to equal the decibel count of Deep Purple. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Alfred Brendel, Julius Drake, Till Fellner, Aleksey Igudesman and Richard Hyung-Ki Joo strut their particular stuff, the surprise coming from the last two musicians who do a clown act, in effect satirizing pianists to the laughter of their live audience.
We’re also let in on the technical skills required by the recording engineers, who read notes as their pianist is playing Bach’s “Art of the Fugue,” a recording that was booked a year in advance and for which Knüpfer must have spent a hundred hours or so preparing the pianos.
“Pianomania” may be too broad a title for this movie, presumably meaning that concert pianists must be obsessive about their craft, seeming to nitpick about matters as whether one gent wants to have “a big, blossoming tone for the note or a more compact intimate tone.” Some of the techie terms thrown about include “harpsichord-situation,” “chamber-situation” and “ensemble situation.”
As a person more interested in the sounds produced by Mr. Knüpfer than the particular ways he manipulates the hammers and strings to get those sounds, I’m probably like the typical member of the movie audience. In that regard I’d have preferred to hear more than mere snippets of the glorious music, which include the aforementioned piece by Liszt, Bach’s “Die Kunst der Fuge,” “Brahms’s “Sommerabend” which has a vocal accompaniment, and Schumann’s “Fantasie C-Dur.” Delivering some 30-120 seconds of each and then shifting back to some talk is like coitus interruptus. Don’t expect any of the drama of Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” in which larger snippets of music are presented together with dramatic situations and gorgeous photography. This is not an edge-of-your-seat experience, but rather a solid, workmanlike look at a profession that has never been examined before in the cinema.
Unrated. 93 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
Story – C+
Acting – B+
Technical – B+
Overall – B
